This seminar will explore theoretical advances from across several topic areas in organizational psychology. Each meeting will focus on one general topic, including organizational ethics and justice, affect and attitudes, work motivation, work stress and burnout, creativity and innovation, power and leadership, and individual differences. Specific course objectives include learning how to (1) discuss and evaluate a given topic area’s state of the science, (3) integrate theoretical and practical interests via state-of-the-art field studies, and (3) identify how organizational psychology – including its theories and research methods – connect to real-world problems as well as your own research interests. For each seminar, students are expected to read 2-4 papers and prepare a comment or question about each paper. All students will also lead at least one seminar discussion, which includes presenting an overview the readings and also organizing the other students’ questions and comments into a coherent discussion. Seminar attendance is mandatory. 10% of the course grade is participation; 20% is leadership (presentation & handling of questions/comments). The other 70% is an essay-based “take-home exam” wherein students must connect the course material to a major current issue in business, sports, government or other organization, chosen at the time of the exam.

In the first week, there will be a general introduction on the Research Master’s programme, and this introduction module in particular, and a workshop on “How to present”. Then, in two blocks of three to four weeks each, students prepare in groups consisting of 3-4 students, a presentation on a particular topic. At the beginning of each block, groups will be assigned 1 or 2 advisors (and a topic). The advisors suggest a number of basic articles, and discuss some interesting avenues for research. In each block, groups and advisors get together 3-4 times. At the end of each block, each group presents and discusses its research proposal. In Block 1 (topics from S&O psychology, Clinical psychology and Clinical neuropsychology) this will be an oral presentation, in Block 2 (topics from Sociology, Education & Development) a poster presentation. All students participate in both blocks. Topics from Psychometrics & Statistics are covered in an R-workshop. Passing the R-workshop is not a requirement for passing this Introductory course, but is an entry requirement for the course Applied Statistics (GMMSGE28).

As this course will be taught in English, all descriptions are in English. Any materials that have to be handed in can be written in either Dutch or English.

This class will contain two overlapping parts. In the first part, students will participate in an pupil dilation experiment of which the data will be analyzed in class. Focus will be on the techniques required to analyze this type of data (e.g., processing of markers, selection of analysis windows, analyzing complete evoked patterns, etc.), not on eyetracking specifically. In the second part, students will build their own pupil dilation experiment using E-Prime (or other tools if preferred by the students) and will collect data. Assessment will consist of assignments, the implementation of the experiment, and the report written about the experiment and data analysis. The report will take the form of a short journal paper, and a more extensive report of the full data analyses.

In previous years, student projects have led to submitted journal publications and have been used as pilot studies for master projects.

This course requires some basic programming skills (e.g., at the level of PSBAM-11 Programming for Psychologists) and some knowledge of E-Prime, OpenSesame, or similar (e.g., PSBAM-07 Experimental methods). A very cursory introduction will be given to both topics, but students who have not followed aforementioned courses will have to do some self-study.

The course is very suitable for students in the research master Clinical Psychology who are interested in pursuing a career combining research with clinical work. The course has three weekly parts, namely a practical skills-training, an integrative e-health development project, and a cognitive therapy practice project. During the first part of each week, an intervention and the therapeutic process is discussed. After this theoretical introduction, students will practice and improve their skills using case material (including footage of treatments from PsycTherapy) with corresponding assignments. Students will practice in role-plays with different phases of the therapeutic process, starting with "introduction and assessment", then moving onto "formulating and executing a treatment plan", and ending with "treatment evaluation". The focus is on the following interventions: exposure (anxiety disorders), behavioural activation (depression), habit reversal (unwanted habits), identifying, challenging and modifying dysfunctional beliefs and, finally, parent training. During the second half day of the week, students form subgroups and develop Internet-based modules and interventions themselves, using the knowledge they gained from the clinical interventions and techniques during the first part of the week. The software used is relatively easy to grasp and therefore the focus is on the content rather than the technical aspects of e-health interventions. Thirdly, an integration between diagnostics/assessments and interventions takes place via the ‘Cognitive therapy practice project’ (CTPP). In CTPP, students practice with an online cognitive therapy aimed at the prevention of depressive relapse, from the perspective of a therapist as well as a client. The online treatment is suitable for ‘healthy subjects’ and handles topics such as daily hassles, dysfunctional beliefs and automatic negative thoughts. The therapeutic contact between students takes place through several forms of media (‘blended care’), such as: face-to-face meetings, meetings via telephone and/or Skype, e-mail and chat. Note that this course runs in parallel with the regular English language master course MKV-3. Intervention skills are trained jointly, while the development of new interventions takes place with research master students separately. Research master students get an additional individual assignment to present during the final practical session.

Students are supposed to have sufficient knowledge on psychopathology as well as on cognitive behavioral therapy.

Opmerkingen

Please note: this course is available for students in the research master Clinical Psychology and cannot be followed if one of the following skills courses is also being followed or has already been followed: MNV-2, MOV-1, MKV-1, MKV-3, CSCP01This course qualifies as a practical that is mandatory for entering a clinical internship in the master (see Nestor for further details on clinical internships).

The goal of this course is to introduce the paradigms from cognitive psychology and psychophysiology that are often used in psychopathology research. Regarding cognitive measures, a number of tasks will be introduced and critically discussed. These include reaction-time tasks that are used to study associations (e.g., priming tasks and the implicit association test) and attention (e.g., emotional stroop, dot-probe) as well as other tasks to study memory, reasoning and interpretation bias. Regarding psychophysiology measures, students will be acquainted with frequently used methods such as skin conductance, EMG, EEG (including ERP), cardiovascular and neuroendocrine measurements as well as fMRI. In the practicum, students will have the opportunity to practice with several of the measurement methods in small group lab assignments.

Developmental psychology addresses the question how people develop, how these developmental trajectories may differ between individuals, and how developmental trajectories can be influenced, for example by therapeutic interventions, specific conditions in the school, or parental behavior. The only way to study developmental processes is to focus on the individual development. More generally, inter- and intra-individual variation is an important source of information about the nature and origin of all human behavior.Process research focuses on the individual unit of analysis, for instance individual children or child-parent pairs, but also on the change process of individual clients in intervention, and in naturally occurring changes in childhood, adulthood and old age. For this process research we thus need longitudinal or time-series individual data, and techniques that are suited to analyze such data. But also another way of asking research questions, based on the information content of this kind of data.In this course students are trained in a process approach to development, and in specific methods to formulate and answer research questions into developmental processes. The methods that are trained in the course entail complex dynamic systems model building and simple and more complex time-series analysis techniques (e.g. recurrence analysis). The general principles of process approach will be explained and applied to a host of developmental, educational, clinical and behavioral phenomena.

The will be additional assignments for students from the research master Behavioural and Social Sciences.

In this small-scale, interactive and intensive course, students will be introduced to relevant historical and contemporary controversies in social psychology. Those include theoretical (e.g., about the existence of altruism or stereotype (in)accuracy), methodological (e.g., implicit versus explicit measurement), and meta-level debates (e.g., about external validity and replicability of research findings). The aim of the course is not just to inform students about such controversies, but to actively involve and immerse them in those debates through an interactive and intensive course set-up, that is, through giving presentations, leading, organizing and participating in discussions, and writing an essay (about a meta-level, theoretical or methodological debate, on which a round of structural feedback is provided by the teacher). Through this set-up, Research Master students learn to not just understand the different perspectives, but also learn how to take a position in which they can summarize and evaluate those perspectives, and to seek integration of sometimes seemingly opposite positions. Note that Research Master students have unique roles and are uniquely evaluated (i.e., in a different way than regular Master students) in this course.

The scholarly literature and public debate of the past two decades is packed with allusions to presumed crises and the resulting transformations of modern econo-mies. To mention but a few: Globalization and financialization (Krippner) by now seem to be taken-for-granted developments in markets. Retrenchment of the welfare state and de-democratization (Streeck) of its capitalist arrangements are seen as the signature of Western nation states. Rationalization of control and flexibilization of production were proclaimed as inevitable survival strategies for firms and public organi-zations. And finally, informatization (Castells) as the driving force behind a nascent network society, and fragmentation of its elites (Mizruchi) shape the social fabric of modern societies.

Each of these presumed macro-level trends or “crises” is subject to heated debates about their very nature, their scope, their antecedents, their consequences, and their potential remedies. The main objective of this course is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the current debates on economic transformations and their social consequences. For this purpose, we will draw on the rich traditions and exciting recent insights in the field of Economic Sociology - “a sociological perspective applied to economic phenomena” (Smelser & Swedberg, 1994). More specifically, for each transformation, we will address a descriptive and an explanatory element.

In the descriptive part, we will first examine the conceptual foundations, striving to arrive at clear-cut definitions. What kind of assumptions are behind the multi-dimensional theoretical constructs that are used to describe each of these transformations (e.g. what exactly does financialization mean? How can we diag-nose a retrenchment of the welfare state?). Subsequently, we investigate to what degree the assumed developments can indeed be observed (historically and geo-graphically). Here, an important question is to what degree such developments reflect temporary shifts or “irreversible” reconfigurations of fundamental social and economic processes and structures. For example, in which sectors and regions can we observe flexibilization of production? How did it evolve through time?

In the explanatory part we will critically analyze current attempts to explain these transformations and their societal consequences. Here, particular emphasis will be on disentangling different social mechanisms, paying particular attention to potentially competing explanations. For example, whereas some observers advocate informatization – the use of the world wide web as a means of instant information dissemination and coordination - as a major stepping stone towards less social segregation and inequality, others argue that this trend will further consolidate existing power asymmetries in favor of large multi-national companies.

The course is designed to enable a high degree of student participation, and is divided into three major parts. During the first part, socio-economic trends and “crises” as postulated by social scientists will be briefly introduced. Furthermore, essential analytical tools of economic sociology (social mechanism reasoning on the one hand, and institutional and network embeddedness on the other hand) will be outlined. The resulting conceptual model will serve as the analytical template for the remaining sessions.

During the second part, each session is devoted to one specific trend or “crisis”. Each participant will have the lead in one of these sessions. This means that the participant, under close guidance of the lecturer, will prepare the structure and content of his or her session. Preparation includes search of (additional) reading or other instructive material, in particular examples and empirical findings, as well as thinking about how to effectively engage the other participants during the session itself (e.g. through assignments, or on the spot tasks). During the session, the “lead” participant will provide a short introductory lecture on the crisis under investigation, drawing on the required readings and the additional material. Preparation of the sessions will take place during bilateral meetings with the lecturer.

The final part of the course consists of a concluding session. We will sum-marize the main findings concerning each trend, separating facts from fiction. Par-ticular attention will be paid to the interrelationship between the different trends. Open questions for economic sociology will be identified.

The course is divided into three parts.Part A: Signal pre-processing and signal analysis.This first part provides information about computer-based data acquisition and analysis. Practical exercises will be performed to enhance the students’ understanding of signal- and analysis characteristics.

Part B: Advanced EEG analysis. In the second part, the course will introduce advanced EEG acquisition and analysis methods. This module follows up on basic knowledge of EEG measurement and analysis techniques, acquired in the Bachelor of sciences degree programme course “Experimental methods (PSB3E-MO7)”. This part focuses on potential distributions and source localization.

Part C: fMRI, TMS and analysis of movementThe third part of the course introduces fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) techniques, and eye tracking and body motion analysis. The fMRI section will consist of a theoretical introduction of the technique. The TMS section consists of a theoretical part, which explicitly focuses on practical and ethical issues, followed by a demonstration of the technique. Principles of eye movement- and motion analysis will be explained, followed by hands-on experience with these methods. Techniques taught in this course provide useful tools for performing both the Master thesis and subsequent doctoral research in the area of human behaviour and underlying brain mechanisms in both health and disease.

The will be additional assignments for students from the research master Behavioural and Social Sciences.

This course is given by the Department of Sociology, Utrecht, coordinated by dr. Ineke Maas. (see: https://www.osiris.universiteitutrecht.nl/osistu_ospr/OnderwijsCatalogusSelect.do?selectie=cursus&cursus=200400065&collegejaar=2011&taal=en&refer=/swcursus/200400065). Students should contact Prof. Melinda Mills in advance via email (m.c.mills@rug.nl)if they would like to participate in this course.

Research master curricula typically focus on teaching students how to do research, but fail to include training on how to theorize. However, the latter is absolutely pivotal because theorizing is essential to interpreting any research finding. Specifically, being trained in creative theory generation and critical thinking will make one’s research designs stronger and the resulting findings more meaningful. This two-day workshop addresses the question of how to theorize through a focused, creative, and interactive approach. Its main message is that, much like doing research, theorizing is something that is fun, interactive, and inherently social. As such it can be learned through exercise and training. In the workshop, we will focus, for instance, on using helpful heuristics to creatively generate hypotheses; and on ‘critical thinking’ that revolves around identifying and playing around with meta-theoretical assumptions; introspectively and collectively defining core concepts in the social sciences (Socratic Dialogue technique); and identifying one’s own ‘hidden assumptions’ about what one studies. Through this hands-on approach, this workshop should not just lead to more knowledge and understanding of how to theorize, but also to a more creative and critical consideration of one’s own assumptions as a researcher.

In this course, students will learn the basic principles and challenges of conducting interdisciplinary research. In addition, students will learn how to conduct literature reviews and meta-analyses. The aim of this course is to enable students to conduct a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of a social problem of their choice, via an in-depth literature review.

In the first part of the course, an introduction will be given in the added value and challenges of interdisciplinary research. Moreover, an introduction will be given in conducting comprehensive literature reviews and meta-analyses. In addition, experts will share their experiences: how is knowledge accumulated and integrated across academic fields, and what guidelines can they give for successfully conducting interdisciplinary research? In the second part of the course, students will apply these insights by conducting a literature review on a topic of their choice, under supervision of a staff member who is an expert in this field. The literature review aims to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of an important social problem. Students will receive feedback on a draft of their literature review from their fellow students with a different disciplinary background, as well as from the expert supervising their literature review.

The course is set up as follows. After a general theoretical introduction into sociological research on solidarity, students choose a specific social phenomenon, for instance delinquency, aging, technology, or migration. Subsequently, students familiarize themselves with the extant literature on this topic from the perspective of 1) social networks; 2) social norms; 3) social institutions, and 4) interventions/policy. Two lectures will be devoted to each perspective. One lecture provides a general introduction, in the other lecture students present their findings with regard to their topic. Ultimately this results in an essay, which provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on important societal problems related to solidarity, approached from different sociological perspectives.

The classes will be organized as a combination of both larger group sessions with all students (lectures) and sessions in which students will be divided into smaller groups (group meetings, with a different composition of the students per week). During the course, students complete assignments, which will eventually lead to the introduction section of your first paper. In addition, students will do review assignments, in which they carefully comment on other students’ work. These review assignments can then be used to revise your work. The deadlines for each of the assignments can be found in the course overview. Assignments need to be uploaded at Nestor. The assignments are cumulative, which means that each time not only the new text, but also the previous version of the article (and, if applicable, comments and reviews of these previous versions) have to be handed in.